Tuesday’s News: Where do you live, and why do we care?

Before we answer that question, let’s first offer congratulations and all best wishes to Sam Wald, MD, MBA, who took over the helm as CSA President at our House of Delegates meeting on Sunday, June 3!

The House took some decisive steps over the weekend, unanimously passing a bylaws change so that your voter registration home address — not your practice address — will determine which geographic CSA district you belong to, and which director and delegates will represent you. So it’s important that we have your home address if we don’t already!

Please log into our website, csahq.org, and update your profile now with both your work and home addresses. Or email Melody Correia, our Membership Data Manager, with your work and home addresses, and let her know which address you prefer for correspondence.

What’s so important about my home address?

When you go to the polls to vote in today’s primary election — and we hope you will! — your voter registration address determines your local district and your candidates.

Some lucky CSA members live quite close to where they work, but others have long commutes due to housing costs, schools, and other considerations. My work at UCLA is only eight miles from my home in Sherman Oaks, but my legislators aren’t the same as those of the people who live in Westwood or Santa Monica.

So let’s say I want to hold a fundraiser for my Assemblymember Adrin Nazarian, who’s important to CSA because he’s on the Assembly Health Committee. Naturally, I’d want to invite other CSA members who live in my district, but right now I don’t even know who they are because we haven’t routinely collected home address information. My colleagues at UCLA, all members of CSA District 11, are terrific, but Mr. Nazarian isn’t particularly interested in meeting them because they don’t live in our legislative district and they probably won’t put up yard signs with his name on them.

We want to connect the dots — to redesign our CSA districts and organize them by home address, and to create a direct link between each CSA member and his/her local Assemblymember and State Senator. By creating a network of key contacts — CSA members who develop trusted relationships with their local legislators to offer advice and perspective on healthcare issues — CSA can greatly improve our advocacy efforts in Sacramento and in your local area. Dr. Wald is setting up a Task Force to work out details of this redesign, and we will keep you posted on developments.

Making residents and fellows full CSA citizens

If you’re doing or ever did a fellowship in California, you may have noticed that there’s no path to take part in CSA governance as a fellow. As a resident, you can participate in our residents’ forum, District 15, but then there’s no way to be formally involved in CSA governance until you finish your fellowship and become an active member. This happened because in decades past, when CSA’s governance structure was formed, very few residents went on to do fellowships.

We know times have changed, and more residents go on to do fellowships every year.

So our House approved a bylaws change to create delegate and alternate delegate positions specifically allocated to fellows. Elections for these positions will take place early in the academic year, and will extend to June of the next year when the House meets again.

The House also approved a resolution to give resident and fellow delegates a full vote at the House of Delegates, as opposed to the ½ vote that residents are currently allotted. Residents and fellows are the future of our society, and we don’t feel that they should be treated as second-class citizens!

The House also approved a novel new measure which will create a new avenue for CSA representation by mode of practice in addition to geography. We’ll tell you more about that in next week’s column.

New officers

We are delighted to congratulate the CSA’s other new officers in addition to Dr. Wald: